Lenin of the Rovers

Lenin of the Rovers was a BBC Radio 4 comedy series from 1988 written by Marcus Berkmann, produced by Harry Thompson and starring comedian Alexei Sayle as Ricky Lenin, Russian captain of Felchester Rovers - Britain's only communist football team. Other regular players in the team were Stevie Stalin (Andrew McClean) and Terry Trotsky (played by Keith Allen in series 1 and by Phil Cornwell in series 2). The team was managed by Ray Royce and Colonel Brace-Cartwright (played by veteran actor Ballard Berkeley for Series 1 episodes 1 and 2. Berkeley died during recordings for the series and the part was then played by Donald Hewlett thereafter) who were frequently interviewed by Frank Lee Brian (played by real-life football commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme). John Sessions and Jim Broadbent made character appearances in Series 2. The title is a parody of the long-running football-themed comic strip, Roy of the Rovers.

Although a knowledge of football was useful for the appreciation of the series, it was not essential. The show parodied many aspects of British football culture in the late 1980s, such as the increasing presence of mass commercialisation in the game, intrusive and rarely accurate media, and fan violence. The script also made frequent use of Ricky Lenin's attempts to fit in with what he saw as a 'western lifestyle', in a similar way to some of Sayle's appearances as the Balowski Family in The Young Ones. Situations included the trouble caused by the ghost-writing of Ricky's column in The Daily Tits (parodying The Sun) - a complicated political treatise arguing in favour of collectivism in Lenin's original text is transformed by the newspaper's ghost writer to "I hate all paddies, but I wouldn't mind giving that Gloria Hunniford one" in the paper; the North-South economic divide in England ("In Crunchthorpe there's a hundred and three per cent unemployment. The Government uses the place to dump nuclear waste...they pile it up in the town centre, outside Freeman Hardy and Willis") and films The Titfield Thunderbolt and Apocalypse Now.

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